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In mice with triple-negative breast cancer, treating with a cancer-killing virus before the tumour was removed made checkpoint immunotherapy work afterwards, which it otherwise did not.
Triple-negative breast cancer has few treatment options and immune checkpoint inhibitors have had limited success in it. Because checkpoint inhibitors work best where anticancer immunity already exists, and oncolytic viruses induce anticancer immunity, Bourgeois-Daigneault and colleagues tested the virus as a way of creating the conditions for the checkpoint inhibitor.
In a model designed to mimic the course of treatment for a woman newly diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, early oncolytic virus treatment combined with surgical resection produced long-term benefit, and sensitised otherwise refractory tumours to checkpoint blockade, preventing relapse in most treated animals. The authors proposed testing this in the window between diagnosis and surgery.
This is the published rationale for the neoadjuvant use of oncolytic virotherapy, and it is the argument the 2024 self-experiment case report cites for its own design.
The field's standing explanation for its own poor clinical record is that it has been tested in the wrong patients: people with widely metastatic, heavily pretreated disease and exhausted immune systems. This paper is the preclinical case for testing it in the opposite situation, in early disease before surgery, where an immune response can still be built.
Shares The self-experiment: a virologist treated her own recurrent breast cancer with two viruses she made in her own laboratory, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares The self-experiment: a virologist treated her own recurrent breast cancer with two viruses she made in her own laboratory, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares The self-experiment: a virologist treated her own recurrent breast cancer with two viruses she made in her own laboratory, Oncolytic viruses, Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).
Shares Science Translational Medicine, Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).
Shares Oncolytic viruses, Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).